Teaching Dissonance

"Beware of the sound of one hand clapping." Most of our education is parallel monologue. Public education knows nothing of a Creator. Homeschooled children are never taught to wrestle with the real arguments of science. As a result, both cast aspersions on the other without really listening to what the other side says.
Ideas come together in a variety of ways. Some ideas naturally fit, some eventually resolve themselves. Some ideas are false and will always clash with the truth. Many church leaders and parents are afraid of the dissonance. This leaves the student to experience the clash in a college classroom when he is without support. I'd rather build dissonance into the curriculum so that the student learns to defend his faith against all comers without fear that the truth will one day let him down. Teach the dissonance, feel the sting, search for answers. Remember the admonition: "Beware the sound of one hand clapping."

Curriculum and Nature

Today's educational curriculum begins with utility because the authors are agnostic about nature. The value and worth of a thing is tied to its utility, they would say. This explains debates about abortion, end of life care, and sex education. Beginning with the nature of a thing brings about far different ends. Education before Dewey had character development and wisdom as its ends. After Dewey, education was pursued for utilitarian ends. I fear the day when a man's value is discussed only by his contribution to society and not by who He is as a human being.

The Contemplation of Nature

Classical Conversations introduced me to Andrew Kern's CD "The Contemplation of Nature." I'll have to listen to it a dozen times to grasp the implications of his lecture on education, but I did learn this. Public, and sadly Christian, schools begin with utility- a holdover from Dewey. To really understand something, you must begin with its nature. Everything that exists began as an idea in the mind of God.
To know anything, Kern says you must follow a three step process:
1. Understand its nature
2. Discern its purpose from its nature.
3. Grasp its propriety.
For example, as a leader, I must understand the nature of those under my care. A follower is made in the image of God, a sinner, a male or female, and one whose ultimate purpose is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Propriety tells me the moral and fitting ways for that nature to be fulfilled.

"Already Gone" is Wake Up Call for Church

Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, has written a prophetic book that the church will ignore at its own peril. The book is the result of a survey of 1,000 adults who have stopped attending church, but were active in their middle and high school years. The researcher does an excellent job of separating reasons from excuses and modern opinion from actual solutions.

The conclusion of the book is that the church has become irrelevant. Nancy Pearcey, in Total Truth, describes the two-tier theory of truth. Secularism has taken the objective fields of knowledge (the sciences) and left the subjective truth of religion and ethics to the domain of opinion. What Ken Ham adds to the discussion is that responsibility for that dichotomy lies squarely at the door of the church.

When differences between the claims of science and Christianity arose, the church caved. As a result, students never hear the counter-evidence. The stories and the worship, the sermons and the music feed emotions, but not the mind. They never relate to the world outside the church doors. Add to that the distance between our beliefs and our actions and we have a recipe for apostacy.

It is past time for the church to answer the questions of the secular world and reunite the worlds of science and ethics under the lordship of Christ. We must take very thought captive for the sake of ourselves and our children. Are we too late? Francis Schaeffer would remind us, "We are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful."

Dorothy Sayers Deserves a Hearing

Dorothy Sayers wrote a ground-breaking essay on the problems of modern education called “The Lost Tools of Education.” In the essay, she discusses the main problem of modern education and a possible solution. She laments that the solution will never be tried, but it is precisely that solution that Doug Wilson and others have implemented to bring about the Classical Education movement.
Sayers writes that modern education teaches fragmented subjects instead of teaching a child how to think. Every subject comes to a student as a foreign language that he struggles to decode. A student has no ability to integrate new information with what he already knows and no ability to express what he has learned persuasively.
In the essay, Sayers believes the answer to the problems of modern education lies in the trivium, going back to the educational ideas of an earlier age. The trivium has three parts, each of which teaches the child how to think. The Grammar stage (Elementary years) emphasizes memorization and repetition of basic facts and terms so that the child has the basic terms and facts to build upon. The Dialectic stage (Junior High) begins the process of integration, seeing the logical relationships between ideas. Students begin studying logic in order to think and argue in a rational orderly way. The Rhetoric Stage (High School) helps the student learn to present his ideas in a persuasive way.
Sayers argues that when the student has learned how to think, he is well on his way to master any subject easily. Because he has learned how to think, he can more easily see the connections between subjects. Because Christ is at the center, all subjects will necessarily relate to him and to each other. This brings a fragmented education together into a unified whole.
The essay Sayers wrote has become the basis of a new way of learning. Public education has become consensus education, where everyone holds the politically correct opinion and those who don’t are scorned. Classical education gives the student freedom to go wherever the facts take him. And because the world is Christ’s, the student can be sure truth will always fit together.

"Consensus Education" Fails Our Country

J. Gresham Machen is my hero. In 1920, in testimony before congress, he predicted that a state-controlled education without the competition of private and home education would become "one of the deadliest enemies to liberty that has never been devised." According to Machen, the government's desire to create a Department of Education served an evil purpose. What dangers did he see?

Now that we are a good ways down the road, its easier to look back and see the consequences. A homogenized education reduces competition in the realm of ideas. Students are given a consensus education- they've never met opposing ideas. There is no robust debate and the majority, politically correct position always wins.

Over time, the majority opinion becomes so ingrained that any opposition must appear ignorant or motivated by emotion. Debate is censored to maintain academic integrity. Consider:

• When ethics are privatized and subjective, objective truth and accountability are narrow-minded


• Sociology experiments with marriage and while children suffer, the minority voice "stirs up hate"


• When Keynesian economics is in ascendancy, Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian school are forgotten amid a propensity for ridiculous debt.


• Design is ridiculed in the face of Darwin.


• George Washington called religion an indispensable support of society while modern Psychology regards religion as dangerous.

The end of this process is that academia has a vested interest in the consensus opinion. They turn an arrogant gaze toward opposition. Academic freedom means nothing more than freedom to hold the consensus opinion. I can think of no worse end for the university or the minds of its students. Where does education go from here? Activism? Skepticism? Renewal?

How to Lose Your Children

What is more important for training our children than youth groups, education curriculum, concert events, peer retreats, or a full-time youth pastor? What if its the example of the parent generation? Listen to the following quote, then spend some time, like me, mulling over its implications:

"The only way we are going to impact the world and the next generation is to prove that our faith in Christ is real and that it works. For countless Christians, I'm convinced it's real. My concern is whether or not we have the fruit to suggest it works... the gap between our theology and our reality is so wide we've set ourselves up for ridicule... some of us are working pretty hard at something that's hardly working." -Beth Moore, Believing God